this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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I made a video about copyparty, the selfhosted fileserver I've been making for the past 5 years.

The main focus of the video is the features, but it also touches upon configuration. Was hoping it would be easier to follow than the readme on github... not sure how well that went, but hey :D

This video is also available to watch on the copyparty demo server, as a high-quality AV1 file and a lower-quality h264.

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[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 47 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

You made this on your phone on the bus ride to and from work.

I cleaned the cat box yesterday and considered that an accomplishment.

Fuck.

[–] markstos@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

Congrats on the cat box cleaning!

[–] johntash@eviltoast.org 40 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Your readme looks super in depth, thanks for that! I haven't watched the video yet but will later.

I didn't see it mentioned from a quick glance, but is either sftp or ftps supported?

[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 37 points 3 days ago (2 children)

SFTP is not currently on the roadmap, but it's not entirely implausible.

FTPS is supported, but it requires an optional dependency to be installed (pyopenssl), so it's not available in the Windows EXE. And I just realized that the dependency is currently not present inside the docker images either, so I'll get that fixed right away.

[–] xnx@slrpnk.net 7 points 2 days ago

Screenshots of the ui at the top of the readme would be nice

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 30 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Clearly a labour of love 👍

Maybe support for some music streaming apps (subsonic?) would be cool?

[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That's a neat idea -- I've heard that a lot of stuff uses the subsonic API under the hood, so I'll see what it would take to become compatible with that. At first glance it looks like I'd have to mine and index way more information about audio files, but could still be doable :>

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[–] chellomere@lemmy.world 25 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Hey fellow scener, cool project!

Just a few thoughts/questions:

  • BTRFS and ZFS support real deduplication via copy on write, and would eliminate all current disadvantages of symlink and hardlink deduplication. It just works.
  • Why have it be one huge python source file? This is a serious code smell imo, and something you really should avoid doing as this can be a major maintenance burden.
[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 27 points 2 days ago (3 children)

BTRFS and ZFS support real deduplication via copy on write, and would eliminate all current disadvantages of symlink and hardlink deduplication. It just works.

yeah that's a good point, I'll add an option to take advantage of this if you know you're running on a filesystem where that works as intended.

Why have it be one huge python source file?

oh don't worry, it's all separate files during development -- there's a build-stage which bundles everything up into a single file for distribution. But thanks for the concern :D

[–] chellomere@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ah, so you have compiled it into one file? Didn't know that was possible for python, what tool do you use for this?

[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

sooo this is one of the things that started with someone saying "wouldn't it be funny if..."

if you open copyparty-sfx.py in a text editor, you'll see how -- but please make sure to use an editor which is able to handle about 600 KiB of comments which contain invalid utf8 / binary garbage 😁

I ended up rolling my own packer since I wanted optimal encoding efficiency, and everything I could find would do stuff like base85 or ucs2 tricks, but it turns out python is perfectly happy with binary garbage in comments if you declare that the file is latin-1 so it realizes all hope is lost :D

the only drawback of the sfx.py is that it needs to extract to $TEMP before running, so that's the slight advantage of the zipapp (the .pyz alternative), but that suffers from some performance reduction in return, and is more hermetic (doesn't let you swap out the bundled dependencies with fresh versions as easily if necessary)

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[–] perishthethought@piefed.social 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The fact you mention security features, without ever saying it's 'super secure' tells me you know a lot about what you're doing. I'm so sick of apps like this that start with "most secure app on the net" but you know they're delusional. Thank you, going to check this out.

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[–] KiwiTB@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Put out some in-depth docker instructions and this will be common use in a month. Good work.

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[–] Pall@piefed.social 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Is there a way to help translate the UI.

I would like to help translate it into Danish.

Would also be willing to help translate the UI.

[–] pwalker@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

you even mention ladybird as browser, nice 😎

[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

it's such an impressive project! Amazing what they've accomplished in so little time, and so important too -- we need as many options as we can get.

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[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 3 days ago (7 children)

Oh my god, this seems really good and closer to what I want than anything yet. Been looking for something to replace Nextcloud and found nothing good so I might take a look at this.

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[–] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Holy shit this is so unbelievably full featured it's not even funny. This is going to rattle some big names. I wonder how long till they try to shut it down because it's better than anything commercially available.

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I haven't even tried it yet, but just from the video you can tell it's going to be insanely good. I'm so impressed.

It's the first bit of software I've seen in a long time where I took one look and immediately thought "Fuck me, I need that!"

I use Unraid for my NAS server and just on the off-chance I checked the Unraid community 'app store' and someone's already created a Docker definition for it, published just today! The hype is real

I'll be giving this a shot

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I bumped into copyparty the other month when looking for a software that could let me transfer files to a friend with the ability to pause/resume. Didn't bother with it, tried another software instead. Never really got it to work so I gave up on it.

Bumped into the YouTube video today, decided to give copyparty a shot, damn sir you've written a fine piece of software. It's so easy to get up and configure. The UI is a bit janky, but charming at the same time. Thanks for all the hard work!

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[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This looks great but I really wish it had SFTP.

[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

thanks for the vote, I hear ya :>

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I would probably remove python 2 support, it was end of life when the project was started.

[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

As long as it's not causing any issues or drawbacks for modern python versions (and it isn't), I don't see any reason to do that -- on the contrary, I know people are running copyparty on retro equipment, so I'd very much prefer to keep it for as long as possible :>

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[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

Thanks for making the video but also for providing non Youtube link. Maybe there is a PeerTube server that would enjoy hosting it.

[–] RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I have a question, and I want to emphasise thar this is not criticism but a request for dive into technicalities.

In the video you mentioned copyparty has an one-way sync tool. Is there a good reason why it's not two-way, or is this just something you weren't motivated to do?

[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago (4 children)

No worries, good question :>

The problem with bidirectional filesync is that it's an absolutely massive can of worms, very easy to mess up, and the consequences of messing up are usually the worst kind (loss of data). There's an insane amount of edgecases to keep in mind, and you need to get every edgecase right every single time, otherwise you might wipe someone's vacation photos, or suddenly downgrade someone's keepass database to an older version... And stuff like syncing multiple devices to the same server makes it balloon further.

I've started becoming more confident in copyparty's filesystem-index database, but it's still just a hint/guideline, with the filesystem being the only source of truth -- it's still not something I'd trust with tracking sync-state against one or more clients.

The bigger guys who offer bidirectional sync (nextcloud, syncthing, etc.) have spent years perfecting their logic, so I'd like to leave this in their capable hands.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 days ago

Sync is one of those things that seems like it should be trivial but is actually super complicated.

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[–] danhab99@programming.dev 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Oh my gawd what a README!! I'm on my phone and I was trying to scroll back to the top of it from the bottom and I just kept on scrolling... Holy shit I'm going to put this on my kanban board give it proper attention

[–] cwista@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

At this rate might be faster to read code than a read me. Or convert to a wiki style if this much details are really needed.

[–] shiftymccool@programming.dev 8 points 1 day ago

Ho... Ly... Shit... This is great! The UI is a bit confusing at first but doesn't take long to get what's going on. I might even be disappointed with a UI revamp 😁 I can't believe how much functionality this has. It's already replacing some processes I have for mounting drives and backing up files. Maybe I missed something, but my only complaint would be the lack of an automatic one-way folder sync in the Party UP! app.

I'm blown away, great job!

[–] tux0r@feddit.org 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Can we have Gopher support?

[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I was thinking of that!! But then I realized that even Firefox removed gopher support by now, so the joke was dead on arrival :P

[–] tux0r@feddit.org 6 points 3 days ago

Firefox isn’t that great for FTP either. Gopher still exists :-) and I’d love to use it even more.

[–] jhoward@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 day ago

Well done! This is exactly what I've been looking for! And it's fun to use and has an aesthetic that reminds me of browsing ftp servers back in the day. And these themes?! I love the whimsy mixed with actual usability.

And its a damn good file server so far: fast, easy to use, makes reasonable security choices, and accessible in the ways I want (rclone mount)

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Everyone loves CP. Tell all your friends about CP.

[–] craftrabbit@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 days ago

Don't believe it. This is easily too good to be true.

[–] uzay@infosec.pub 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Look cool! I think you should consider putting a screenshot of the UI somewhere near the top of the README

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[–] gusgalarnyk@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Sometimes I feel so new to setting up my own digital ecosystem because I look at a thing and think "that's so cool" but struggle to imagine it at home. So could someone help me understand.

This would be a replacement for something like Google Drive or Proton Drive? The actions I would use this for would be:

  • sending files to friends
  • managing a collection of files like PDFs, music, ISO's that could be accessible by my friends (or just my household)

So I would spin this up on my NAS or my main PC and replace those services and accomplish those actions using this software?

Are there other services or actions I'm missing? Am I misunderstanding the premise entirely?

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[–] Admax@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm properly in awe at this project. Not only does it support a wide range of protocols and runs practically everywhere, but it can play audio, video, display images and has keyboard shortcut support ???

It's got everything I could think about and so much more.

I can't wait to try it out !

Thank you so much for your time and for making this open source.

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[–] kayohtie@pawb.social 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Great job on something like this! I'll probably give it a whirl soon, I like Nextcloud but find it clunky sometimes because it's often a bit more than I need. Maybe breaking it up into Immich + this would help! Thank you for sharing your project!

One thing to note, your comparison against Nextcloud has a partially-incorrect point regarding file upload max size. The client does upload chunking, so is unaffected by the Cloudflare issue as well, but I believe the web client is still affected, just not the apps. https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/big_file_upload_configuration.html#adjust-chunk-size-on-nextcloud-side

I suspect a few others may be as well, but I'm only familiar with the Nextcloud one because that's what I've been running, and discovered in making sure I could still upload video files recorded while out and about.

Also love that it looks like a simpler install!

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[–] Pika@rekabu.ru 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Alright, you bought me with this

Amazing presentation and nice that you have a demo!

[–] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

Elderly raspberry pi B [✓]

Large portable drive gathering dust [✓]

Guess I'm setting up a locally hosted file server in the near future.

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